Night Music, Music for a Viennese Salon Steven Zohn eight-keyed fl, Rebecca Harris vln, Marika Holmqvist vln, Daniel Elyar vla, Rebecca Humphrey Diederich vc, Heather Miller Lardin violone Avie 2423, 2020 (1 CD: 66 minutes).

Abstract

The recently released album Music for a Viennese Salon by the chamber ensemble Night Music transports listeners to one of Vienna’s leading musical salons during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The host of the musical gathering is Fanny von Arnstein (1758–1818), a Jewish salonnière, notable amateur keyboardist and singer, music patron, and founder of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. According to Steven Zohn’s liner notes for the album, this imagined performance in Arnstein’s salon took place in 1801, two decades after Arnstein began hosting her salon (p. 4). During her nearly 40-year tenure as a salonnière, Arnstein became one of the best-known salon hosts in Viennese society. This album, then, offers a glimpse into the musical activities of a central figure in the city’s musical identity and ongoing legacy. The musical portion of this 1801 salon gathering includes three multi-movement works for chamber ensemble. Joseph Martin Kraus’s Quintet in D for Flute and Strings (VB188; 1799) begins the concert with three movements (I. Allegro Moderato, II. Largo, III. Finale: con brio). The next work attendees hear is Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s Duetto in E flat (Kr219) for viola and violone (I. Allegro, II. Menuetto I, III. Adagio, IV. Menuetto II, V. Andante [Tema con variazioni]). Johann Peter Salomon’s 1801 arrangement of Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 in G major ‘Surprise’ (Hob1:94) serves as the finale to the evening’s performance (I. Adagio – Vivace assai, II. Andante, III. Minuetto, IV. Allegro di molto). Arnstein’s salon was active in twomain periods – one beginning in 1780 and the second in 1803; this album thus emulates the musical performances that took place in the earlier salon. Lauded for its elaborate style and long guest lists, Arnstein’s salon gatherings during this earlier period were originally modelled on the grand French salons of the eighteenth century, like many other late eighteenthcentury salons in Germany and Austria. During the two decades of her earlier salon, Arnstein established a reputation for herself as one of the only successful Jewish salonnières in Vienna, a city in which religious freedom for the Jewish population had only been legally granted in 1781.